This column will change your life: Anger

Certain facts about human psychology are so obvious, so undeniable, that they become invisible, and we act as if they weren't true at all. For example: anger can be fun. "It feels a lot like the first rush of an opiate – a tingling warmth on the insides of your elbows and wrists, in the back of your knees," the American cartoonist Tim Kreider wrote in a recent essay, looking back at the years he spent eviscerating the Bush administration. "Once I realised I enjoyed anger, I noticed how much time I spent experiencing it. If you're anything like me, you spend about 87% of your mental life winning imaginary arguments that are never actually going to take place."

I'm not quite at 87%, but I know what he means. In so many ways, a world without provocations to anger — without the Daily Mail, or leaky headphones on public transport, or Daniel Hannan MEP, or people who use the phrase "going forward" — would be a vastly preferable one. But in another, almost secret way, it wouldn't.

Most people, of course, will agree that anger isn't all bad: it can be justified, and righteous, and it can be a motivator to actions that need to be taken. A total inability to feel it, whatever the circumstance, would surely count as a psychological problem. But we rarely acknowledge that it can be a pleasure we seek out. Paul McKenna has yet to write a bestseller entitled I Can Make You Angry. "We prefer to think of it as a disagreeable but fundamentally healthy involuntary reaction to negative stimuli thrust upon us by the world we live in, like pain or nausea," Kreider wrote, "rather than admit that it's a shameful kick we eagerly indulge again and again." Anger swells the ego; it enhances our feelings of being in control, energised, and alive.

And yet it may even be more than a fleeting pleasure: it may be a route to a kind of fulfilment. One recent study, probing the life-satisfaction levels of political activists, suggests that those driven to protest and demonstrate are happier than those who aren't. (To be fair, the idea that activists are more often angry than others remains speculation, but it's not an unreasonable one.) Campaigners aren't just acting with a sense of regrettable necessity, but are deriving real payoffs. Saul Alinsky, the godfather of leftwing activism, saw this well. "People hunger for drama and adventure, for a breath of life in a dreary, drab existence," he wrote in Rules For Radicals.

That's not to demean angry activism per se, which can be justified and noble. But seen through this lens, a lot of public anger does begin to look deeply suspect: it's a little problematic to be calling for an end to this or that if you're deriving pleasure from your anger at the fact that it hasn't yet ended. There is, as Kreider noted, an entire anger industry, dedicated to stoking it instead of channelling it fruitfully: Jeremy Clarkson rages against political correctness, but in a world with no trace of it, where would that leave Jeremy Clarkson? (I'm not going to address the question of whether the leftwing media may sometimes also be guilty of something similar.) "It is important to realise that blaming is fun," wrote M Scott Peck. "Anger is fun. Hatred is fun. And like any pleasurable activity, it is habit-forming. You get hooked on it." It's enraging, but he's right.